I am sorry about your issues. I do not do French and i am new to this App too. I do have 1 minor issue which their tech help is useless on, but overall I am very impressed with this App. With Pages and I have struggled for years - I feel like Argh!!!!!!! When I use this App it feels fresh and clean and I actually like using it oppsoed to Pages! Pages leaves me with a lot of tensity.

The hyphenation in German is really bad. The consequence is clear: I am not able to create printer ready copies with NW Pro. Good hyphenation is THE MOST IMPORTANT feature for writing and publishing academic texts - in a German language context. NWPro is a nice wordprocessor for small papers but not for professional use. Word has a very good German (and french) hyphenation.

Nisus can't be held accountable for hyphenation errors. NWP uses Apple's hyphenation dictionary (NWP's Help, page 32/56). If you feel uneasy with Apple's dictionary you why don't you try googling open source CocoAspell instead? (Come to that, I'm not sure you'll find hyphenation dictionaries too, though.)
Moreover, are you sure you told the program you are writing in German, or French, or what-have-you? In a nutshell, check the flag at the bottom right of the window (click and hold to see the language.) Does it reflect the language you are writing in? Programs don't guess languages.

Yes, I am sure... Of course I am writing with the German flag. But it's not a problem of Apple and its (bad) hyphenation alone. Word 2004 HAS a good hyphenation because it has its own hyphenation system, Mellel has as well, though hyphenation in Mellel is not as good as in Word but much better than in NWPro. Well, there is a problem with soft hyphens as well...

Well, everybody, I have been using Nisus forever, I write mostly in French, quite a lot in Italian and sometimes in German - I am really surprised how much you make of hyphenation... First, as Groucho mentions, Nisus uses Apple hyphenation dictionaries. Secondly, it is not true that Word has better dictionaries - at least in French and Italian. There are different hyphenation mistakes, but there are mistakes.
The sad truth is that hyphenation is not high in the priority of ANYONE, and there is a difference between the imperatives of hyphenation and the way they have been treated by informatics generally in other languages than English. Only the very professional software (XPress and such) is anything near right, and even there, my publisher (whom I just asked) assures me you have to correct some hyphenation choices.
I find rather ridiculous to say any word processor is "useless" because of hyphenation...If it's so important to you, so don't hyphenate - very few lines or instances really need it.
Just for the record, I just sent Nisus a 510-page book written with NWP, in one single hyphenated file - styles, find, indexing, not to mention solidity and comfort were the most important things during the six months I spent using Nisus several hours a day. When transported into XPress, the hyphenations disappeared anyway...

I do not agree with Anne Cuneo. If you have to produce a book for print - I mean a camera-ready copy - you need hyphenation. A text with justification looks pretty awful. There is no German publisher that acceppts texts without hyphenation. I produced books with LATEX and with NotaBene. LATEX is phantastic (hyphenation in German and French works excellent), and NotaBene has soft hyphenation. - By the way: Word for Mac 2004 has a very good German hyphenation. May be that not everything works correct but there is - too - a good soft hyphenation to correct these minor issues. To make it clear: I do not prefer Word but NWPro lacks an important feature to produce a well formatted book that will be accepted by publishers.

If you have to produce a book for print - I mean a camera-ready copy - you need hyphenation. A text with justification looks pretty awful.

But in the case you must produce a camera-ready copy, you can correct the few hyphenation mistakes there are manually before going to the camera. With justified text, some lines look too empty if one does not split words, but they are easy to see and to correct manually just before being photographed. That's what I do with long texts which need to be 100% and are not going through XPress. One sees them easily while scrolling, there are maybe a dozen instances in 100 pages. In French at least. It might be that in German there are hundreds? In that language, I write only letters to people who do not speak any other language.

NWPro lacks an important feature to produce a well formatted book that will be accepted by publishers.

I beg your pardon for asking, but which “publisher” needs you to preform your text? You mean a printing shop I suppose? Publishers have their own formatting, and the hyphenation problem then is no problem at all.[/i]

as Swiss woman you should know that nearly all German (and Swiss as well) publishers produce books - and I mean academic books like dissertations or "Habilitationsschriften" or other monographs - from a camera-ready copy made by the author himself. All major academic series (e.g. publishers Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, or Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York) are made this way. This is, by the way, the only opportunity to publish a book without or with a low budget.

i know the problem with german academic publishers, but i think Anne is right. If you use ms word you also have to look through the whole text for wrong hyphens and spaces in your typoscripts which are due to words word don't know. It's always visible for an experienced eye if the hyphens were done by a wordprocesor or a human.